Moth Smoke (20 page)

I have no moles. Not even one. I didn’t know that, but Mumtaz has looked and looked, and now she’s given up.

Manucci adores her. He brings us tea without us asking for it and leaves it outside my bedroom when the door is shut. Mumtaz likes chatting with him. She says someday she wants to write an article on young pickpockets in the old city, and Manucci has promised to take her on a guided tour of his former haunts. Once, when I haven’t seen Mumtaz for a couple of days and she wastes half an hour talking to Manucci before she comes upstairs to wake me, I get upset and tell her I don’t understand why she would rather spend her time with him than with me. She says it’s cute that I’m jealous. And I become angry, asking how she could
even suggest I’m jealous of my own servant. She says she was only joking, and then I feel completely embarrassed, and when we make love I keep looking at her to see if she’s laughing at me.

Then one night Mumtaz asks me if I’ve done heroin again, even though I haven’t, and it turns out Manucci has told her I spend all my time sitting on the sofa, rolling joints and smoking. I decide enough is enough. I go to the servant quarters with a leather belt and tell him I’ll thrash him if he talks about me behind my back. He pulls his bedsheet up around his eyes and stares at me. But he doesn’t do it again.

The next day I see Mumtaz cry. Not just shed tears but cry, with furious gasps and shouts of pain. Her voice is always throaty, almost hoarse, but when she cries she chokes off her words, and it hurts me to watch.

When she stops trembling and sobbing and can speak, I ask her why.

‘I’m a bad mother,’ she tells me.

‘You’re not.’ I stroke her hair.

‘You don’t know,’ she says, frighteningly serious, her eyes wide and sharp. ‘You don’t know.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Muazzam told me I don’t love him.’

‘Why?’

‘He wanted me to read him a story and I came here instead.’

‘Read him a story when you go back.’

‘I don’t want to. That’s the problem. I don’t want to.’

I don’t understand Mumtaz’s relationship with her son. Sometimes she does so much for him, too much, everything he asks, from the time he wakes until the time he goes to bed. But she never seems to do it because she wants to, only because it upsets her when he gets angry with her. And sometimes she won’t do anything for him, leaving him at home with his nanny all day.

We think Ozi still doesn’t know about us. Mumtaz rarely stays with me for more than a couple of hours at a time, unless he’s in Switzerland or the Caymans. I’m surprised he doesn’t smell me on her. Maybe he doesn’t care, but I doubt it. Part of me wants him to know. Part of me is afraid. When we were small Ozi was a bully, but then he was just a boy, and if you were bigger than him he went away. Now he’s not a boy. He’s a man and his father’s son, and what they want done can be done and done quietly.

Maybe I should ask Murad Badshah if I can borrow his revolver.

When I’m not with Mumtaz, I usually have nothing to do. When I’m not with Mumtaz and I do have something to do, I’m generally selling hash. It isn’t much money. And even if it does buy me petrol and food, I don’t like doing it. I don’t like the way I think I look to other
people when I’m doing it, and I don’t like the way they treat me.

One day I catch Manucci taking a hundred-rupee note, washed out and red, from my wallet.

‘What are you doing?’ I ask him, coming into the living room.

He drops my wallet and the note onto my jeans and starts to back away. ‘It was to buy groceries for the house, saab,’ he says.

I take hold of him by the flesh of his upper arm and squeeze until he cries out. He’s never been so eager to do the grocery shopping before that he couldn’t wait until I woke up.

‘You weren’t stealing from me, were you?’

‘No, saab.’

‘If you ever steal from me, I’ll make you wish my mother never took you off the street.’

‘Please, saab.’

I let go and he runs into the kitchen. I know I haven’t paid him in a long time. But he isn’t going hungry: he eats food from my kitchen and sleeps under my roof. Sometimes servants only want their pay so they can leave, and if that’s his plan I won’t make it easy for him. Not that he has anywhere else to go.

One day I’m at Main Market, picking up a paan and a pack of smokes from Salim, when I see Pickles get out of his Land Cruiser and walk over to a Pajero. He embraces
someone I haven’t met in a while, and I go to say hello with a big grin.

I tap Arif on the back. ‘Oh-ho,’ he exclaims, hugging me with enthusiasm. ‘This is turning into a reunion.’

I like Arif. A bit slow, he was the butt of our section’s jokes in senior school. Luckily for him, his family owns half of Sialkot.

Pickles and I shake hands. ‘Listen, boys,’ he says. ‘I’m having a little get-together for some of our batchmates at the Punjab Club this evening. You must come.’

The ‘must’ may be meant more for Arif than for me, but I smile anyway and say, ‘I’d be delighted.’ It’s not every day I’m invited to the Punjab Club, after all.

‘Batchmates only,’ Pickles says. ‘So no wives or fiancées. And jacket and tie, Daru.’

That night, as I’m getting ready, Manucci reminds me he can’t iron my shirt without electricity. ‘Boil some water and put it in the iron,’ I say. ‘Do the best you can.’

I pull into the Punjab Club, curving around the tennis courts, and park in front of the bakery. The car next to mine is a Suzuki Khyber, which makes me feel good, because most of the spaces are filled by huge monsters.

A uniformed bearer greets me as I enter and directs me out the back to the swimming pool area, where I see thirty or so very familiar faces, rounder, of course, their flesh hanging more loosely from their bones, but still familiar.

Ozi waves me over. ‘How are you, yaar?’ he asks, shaking my hand.

‘How are you?’ I respond, wanting to look friendly but aware that the smile on my face is forced. I hold on to him longer than is comfortable, trying and failing to think of anything to say, and I avert my eyes before letting go. I’m confused and a little out of breath, unsure whether what I’m feeling is fear or anger or guilt or dislike. Probably a bit of each. I force myself not to think about it as I drift about, chatting and embracing old buddies, but I’m deeply unsettled, and it’s some time before I manage to relax.

Dinner is a delicious march through colonial culinary outposts like mulligatawny soup and roast beef and caramel custard. As I eat, I find myself starting to enjoy the evening, temporarily taken back to the days when I had a crew cut and a sportsman’s colors on my blazer. It’s amazing how quickly old school friends slip back into remembered relationships. For an hour I’m not the poorest person here by far, the only one without a job or any secure source of income, but a schoolboy good at academics, a solid athlete, and a heroic prankster with a legendary raid on our headmaster’s house to my credit.

Then I meet Asim and reality slaps my beaming face.

Asim was our section’s arm-wrestling champ. I haven’t seen him in years, but it looks like he’s taken up bodybuilding.

‘Oye, Daru,’ he yells.

It’s clear he’s drunk, and I wonder where he’s hidden his booze.

‘Oye, Asim,’ I yell back.

‘Is it true you’re selling charas now?’ He says it in a loud voice that I’m sure is overheard.

‘Very funny,’ I say quietly.

‘That’s sad, yaar, sad.’ He shakes his head.

I’ve had enough. ‘What’s your problem, sisterfucker?’

‘Don’t speak to me like that.’

‘Suck me.’

He grabs me by my shirt, and I’m about to knock his teeth in when we’re pulled apart and I hear Pickles cry, ‘No fighting, no fighting.’

‘Bloody charsi,’ Asim yells, struggling against the hands that restrain him.

‘Ignore him,’ Ozi says, leading me away.

But I can’t ignore him. The words have been said. I’m sure everyone wants to know what the scuffle was all about, and by the end of the evening they will.

Remember Daru? He’s selling drugs now.

I pull away from Ozi and head for my car.

To hell with them all.

This time I buy a thousand worth from Murad Badshah. I’ve sold half of it when Shuja calls. He wants some more hash, so I tell him to come and get it.

He arrives later that night, in a car with a driver.

‘How old are you?’ I ask him as I take him inside. I’m stoned, as usual, and a little lonely because I haven’t had anyone to talk to today.

‘Sixteen.’

I wonder whether sixteen’s too young to be smoking hash. Then I decide it isn’t. I wasn’t much older than that when I started, and kids today are doing everything earlier than we did. It’s the MTV effect.

Manucci watches as Shuja and I exchange the hash for a thousand, a disapproving look on his face. I give him a quick glare, and he ducks back into the kitchen.

‘How long have you been a doper?’ I ask Shuja.

‘Oh, you know.’

‘I don’t know. Six months? A year?’

He looks uncomfortable. ‘A month, maybe. A couple of my friends tried it before that, but we never had anyone to buy from.’

Maybe I shouldn’t sell it to him. But he pays a thousand when all my other customers pay five hundred. Besides, he’s nothing to me.

‘Don’t do too much,’ I say.

‘I won’t. My father’s strict. He’d thrash me if he found out.’

I walk him out and stand in the driveway long after his car has disappeared, smoking a cigarette and trying hard to see even a single star through the night haze. I hear
Manucci come up behind me. He doesn’t say anything.

‘What is it?’ I ask.

‘Saab.’

Something in his voice makes me turn around. He’s looking at the ground, and when he looks up I’m surprised because he’s so afraid.

‘What?’

‘Don’t do this.’

I take a drag of my cigarette and then drop it onto the driveway, putting it out with my shoe. ‘Do what?’

‘Sell charas.’

I feel the anger coming, slow and dry, the air moving through my nostrils, the swelling in my torso. This will not happen. I won’t permit it. My servant will not tell me what to do.

‘What did you say?’ I ask, my voice a warning.

‘This is wrong, saab. You shouldn’t sell charas.’

I look at Manucci, this boy now almost my height, at the sparse, dirty curls of his newly arriving beard, the food stain beside his mouth, the slack hang of his lips. And I can’t wait any longer.

I step forward and slap him across the face with all my strength.

His head snaps to one side and he stumbles, falling to the ground. He cries out softly, a low sound, rough at the end, and covers his mouth with his hands. Then he looks up at
me, the fear gone from his expression, leaving only seriousness and a gleam in one watering eye.

My hand is numb. I walk into the house, rubbing it.

I wake up with my head pounding, sweating hard. Two blades of the ceiling fan come together in an insane grin, the whole contraption absurd as it hangs over my face, dead in the heat. I yell for Manucci, and the effort sends blood rushing into my skull.

Damn that boy. Where is he?

I yell again, so loud it hurts, and still he doesn’t come. An uneasiness settles into my stomach. I drag myself into the bathroom and sit down, my thighs sweating against the plastic seat of the toilet. As a general rule, I’m not one to wake and bake. But today I feel like making an exception, so I hollow out a cigarette, repack it with some hash, and take a long hit just as a shaft of pain knifes through my rumbling bowels.

Liquid. Completely liquid. And acidic. The worst kind. Frothy and all that. I need some Imodium, a double dose double quick, or I’ll be dehydrated by sunset.

I clean myself, wash my hands in the hot tap water with a sliver of soap, take my bedsheet, wrap it around my waist, and trudge out of my room in search of Manucci. The house is quiet, dead moths on the floor and sooty marks on the ceiling above candles that burned themselves into puddles of wax overnight. Not only has the boy forgotten
to sweep, he’s wasted perfectly good candles by not blowing them out. He’s in for it when I find him.

But I can’t find him. I’m smiling now, the kind of smile that stretches over clenched teeth. When I step outside, gripping my bedsheet with one hand, and see the gate open, both metal doors flung outward, I tilt my face up to the sun and cover my eyes with my fists. Then I stand there, naked, the taste of blood in my mouth, holding the first knuckle of my fist with my teeth. A woman walks by the gate, leading a little boy with a balloon of hunger in his belly and hair bleached by malnutrition. Neither of them sees me.

I shut the gate, stare up and down the street from behind it. Somehow I know that he won’t come back. Manucci is gone. My own servant has left me, left because of one little slap. That boy had better pray I never see him again. To think that I fed him, sheltered him, for all these years, and this is his loyalty, his gratitude.

I can feel the heat radiating from the metal of the gate.

I head back inside, and my stomach is so bad that I vomit before I can make it to the bathroom. Then I curl up on my bed, exhausted. When the sun goes down, I get up again, take a cloth and bucket, and clean up the mess I’ve made, gagging from the smell. Even when I’m done, the stench lingers in the house. I head out to the medical store to stock up on Imodium and rehydration salts. I also pick up a packet of biscuits, but when I try to eat them, I can’t.

I wake up the next morning feeling weak, but I haven’t had any vomiting episodes or bowel movements during the night, so I know that I’m not in danger of dehydration. Besides, I’ve finished off several packets of salts, taken three times the recommended amount of Imodium, and downed a full two-liter bottle of water. Excessive, I know, but I hate being sick.

The only person I see for the next two days is Mumtaz. She buys canned soup and heats it for me, saying I shouldn’t have high expectations because she’s a horrible cook. I tell her about Manucci, and she gets angry with me. She seems to think it’s my fault. I’m too tired to argue, and I don’t want her to know I’ve been selling charas, so I sip my soup and keep my mouth shut.